As anyone who has gone Googling will tell you, Wikipedia is evolving into the font of all human knowledge. Need an explanation of Einstein's theory of relativity? Curious about who voices those anonymous cameos in the new Simpsons movie?

Linda Ellerbee: "Journalism: That profession whose business it is to explain that which it personally does not understand."

A quote which is much funnier when you realize that this is very near to what the official Wikipedia editorical policy is: Don't worry about whether or not the editor making that change understands the subject or not-- it's irrelevant. The only important thing is whether or not the verifiable source he's using is authoritative.

Nevermind that to understand whether or not a sourced statement is authoritative, or even relevant to the statement at hand, you really do need to understand the subject yourself; and thus, if the subject is at all technical, that means you need some subject-matter-expertise to do much more than fix grammer and spelling. Ahem, but for the sake of Wikipedia's 5 pillars, let's just pretend that's not so. Jimbo says it isn't. And since Jimbo is an acknowleged Universal Expert on Epistemology {{fact}}, how can anything Jimbo tells us be nonsense?

if the subject is at all technical, that means you need some subject-matter-expertise to do much more than fix grammer and spelling.

Actually, you need a bit of subject knowledge to know whether what you think is a misspelling is in fact a real word. For example, I have no idea whether a grammer is someone who weighs things in grammes.

Actually, you need a bit of subject knowledge to know whether what you think is a misspelling is in fact a real word. For example, I have no idea whether a grammer is someone who weighs things in grammes.

I was somewhat miffed when I deliberately used the word "uneducable", because I had taken it from the source I was referencing, and because it is a valid word, and somebody decided they knew better and made it ineducable (replacement of non-existant word being the edit summary).

It is one of those irritating losses. It wasn't worth fighting over, but I felt a tiny little loss that was needless. A real editor might question it, but it would be returned to the author for confirmation. When I wrote a couple of books, as the author it was my call as to whether to accept the edits or challenge them. This was somewhat tricky at times as I had as an editor some cat from Des Moines without a sense of humour (or a cleaning plant*) who thankfully did not appreciate my little witticisms, which in retrospect I am so glad were removed! I also had to write in a foreign language (American English) so I could not tell if his petty corrections were sensible.

So when you use well chosen words, not long, pseudo-intellectual guff like "at this point in time" and someone messes around for no betterment it is annoying - which is not to say my choice is always best. As mentioned before, I've dropped using "whilst" as it clearly was pissing a lot of people off, but it is not archaic usage, nor wrong, but there is no point writing something where the writing irritates and there is another way or writing.

I wish Wikipedia would understand the Campaign for Plain English (aka the crystal mark) but they make the mistake of thinking it means Simplified English. It is something I am very guilty of, my natural reading age of my writing is very high and I can alter my word choice to improve it. Then it gets annoying when someone thinks (and indeed argues) that we should not be writing in plain English because the encyclopedia is for clever people.